The fatal shootings at New Life Church highlight security challenges for religious groups, many of which have open campuses and try to welcome strangers, experts said Monday.

New Life Pastor Brady Boyd on Monday praised volunteer security guard Jeanne Assam, who he said saved many lives by shooting a gunman who had shot five people, two fatally, at the church Sunday.

Other large Colorado Springs churches reported that they activated security plans after hearing of the attack at New Life. Some already employ armed, professional security guards, while others rely on volunteer church members.

At Woodmen Valley Chapel, where nearly 6,000 people attend services each week, unarmed volunteers regularly patrol for suspicious activity, said Executive Pastor Doug Olsen. A former school administrator, Olsen said maintaining security in an educational building is mostly a matter of looking out for strangers. A church has to approach security differently, he said.

“Here, we welcome strangers,” he said. “It’s a little more difficult for us or any other church because of the fact that we are opening our doors to the community.”

During a Woodmen Valley service Sunday, staff members noticed a woman unexpectedly approaching the platform at the front of the church.

“Immediately, I was there,” Olsen said. “In that case it was pretty easy — she just wanted to come up and kneel in prayer. But you never know.”

Churches are rarely the targets of murderous rampages similar to recent attacks at an Omaha, Neb., shopping mall and Virginia Tech, said Peter Klismet, a former FBI agent and criminal justice professor at Pikes Peak Community College.

Still, Klismet said employing armed guards might be an important step for churches to prevent or limit the damage in future attacks like the one at New Life.

“I think that would be a very unpopular thing to do, but it just reflects the times that we seem to be living in right now,” he said.

Some Colorado Springs churches already employ armed guards, including First Presbyterian Church, where roughly 3,000 people attend services each Sunday. First Presbyterian hires uniformed off-duty police officers to provide security at its services.

Unlike Woodmen Valley Chapel, First Presbyterian continued with its evening services Sunday after hearing of the shooting at New Life, said Al Clark, the church’s leader of support ministries.

Focus on the Family, a Colorado Springs-based Christian ministry that occupies 81 acres in the northern part of the city, has contract security guards and an internal security team, said spokesman Gary Schneeberger. The guards were armed Monday, Schneeberger said. The ministry heightened security after the New Life shooting, he said.

A gunman took hostages at Focus on the Family in 1996. He surrendered after a six-hour standoff, and no one was hurt.

Michael Briggs, president of Konquest Security in Colorado Springs, said adding armed security at a church could be a challenge because some members would oppose gun-toting guards in their place of worship.

“The last thing you want is to start seeing armed guards with metal detectors as you come into a church,” he said. “If we get to that point, we’re failing as a society.”

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